A mountainside villa on the edge of Ashford City.
Upstairs, in the master bedroom, the air was still thick with heat.
Nathaniel Cole pressed his lips to the small mole above her collarbone one last time, then rolled away and sat up on the edge of the bed.
“Let’s get a divorce.”
His voice was flat.
Empty of anything at all.
Eliana Hart was still catching her breath.
She turned, searching his face, waiting for the punchline that never came.
They’d been married one year.
She still hadn’t learned to predict him.
“She has stomach cancer,” he said.
“Six months, maybe less.”
He lit a cigarette.
Smoke curled up and softened the hard lines of his jaw.
“Being my wife, even for a little while, before she dies it’s the only thing she’s ever asked me for.”
Eliana said nothing.
The room went silent around them.
The lamp on the nightstand threw their shadows long across the wall, and somehow, even lying in the same bed, the distance between those shadows looked impossible to close.
He glanced sideways, registering her silence as hesitation.
“It’s only for show,” he added.
“We remarry once it’s over.”
“Nathaniel.
She has six months left.
That’s all.”
He said it like a weather report.
Like a fact that required no permission.
Eliana stared at the sharp line of his profile and thought: I suppose I have to say yes to this too.
Every request from him had always landed on her like a decree.
She obeyed them the way other people obeyed gravity not because she chose to, but because she didn’t know how not to.
That was the shape their whole history had taken.
She had loved him since she was a girl, ever since the night he stepped between her and her stepfather’s fists, holding a broken length of fence board like a weapon, telling the man in a voice that didn’t shake: Touch her again and I will end you.
She’d been beaten half to death that night.
What she remembered most was the rain, the blood on the pavement, and his white knuckles wrapped around that splintered board his eyes colder and steadier than anything she’d ever seen.
He’d saved her life.
She gave him the rest of it in return.
For seven years she did whatever he asked, and did it better than anyone else could have.
And every time, he’d rest a hand on her head and murmur, “Good girl, Eliana.” Nothing more than that, a few quiet words, the occasional passing kiss but she told herself that was simply who he was.
Reserved.
Undemonstrative.
Not cold, just quiet.
People called her pathetic for waiting on him like that.
She never minded.
Then, a year ago, his grandfather’s health collapsed, and the Cole family decided a wedding might turn their luck around.
Nathaniel came and found her, and they went to file the marriage license together.
She thought finally, after seven years, this was the reward for all of it.
Instead, marriage made him colder.
She could feel, more than see, how little he wanted her near him.
“Eliana.
Are you even listening?”
He was frowning at her now, irritated by her silence.
“Does it have to be this way?” she asked quietly.
He didn’t answer that.
Instead: “She doesn’t have much time left, Eliana.
She’s suffering.”
“And what about me?” The question slipped out before she could stop it.
He paused.
Something impatient flickered behind his eyes.
Three seconds passed before he spoke again.
“She’s dying, Eliana.”
“You don’t understand she loves me.
But because I’m married, she’s never once tried to cross a line.
I’ve offered her things and she always refuses them.”
“She’s a good person.
Just let her have this.”
“Don’t make me start thinking you’re the cruel one here.”
His tone stayed level, almost gentle.
It broke something in her anyway.
So this was what they called kindness now sleeping with someone’s husband and dressing it up in soft words.
And a wife who wouldn’t hand her husband over on request that made her the villain.
She studied his face.
Same face it had always been.
Deep-set eyes, a straight blade of a nose, a mouth cut thin and sharp.
When had he started changing into this?
Probably the day she walked into their lives.
“Are you certain you want this divorce?” Eliana asked, one final time.
He didn’t answer right away.
His mouth pressed into a hard line.
Then, finally, he opened it.
“Yes.
You”
“Fine.”
She cut him off before the sentence could finish.
He stopped short.
His eyes narrowed, studying her with something close to suspicion.
“You’re getting sharper, Eliana.” There was an edge of real anger in it now.
“You realized I needed your agreement, so you’re using it against me.”
She said nothing back, just watched their two shadows sitting motionless on the pale wall.
Nathaniel crushed out his cigarette, said no more, dressed quickly, and walked out without a backward glance.
He never once wondered what she might be feeling, or how it might land on her being asked to hand her marriage over so someone else could die married to him.
He didn’t need to wonder.
He already knew she couldn’t walk away from him.
She never had.
Not in seven years.
Slam.
The door shut behind him, and Eliana was alone.
She sat there a long time, watching the space where the door used to be.
Buzz.
Her phone lit up.
A new message from the contact she’d saved under the name V.B.
Second Account.
He came to see me again tonight.
Attached: a photo of Nathaniel’s reflection in the villa’s entryway glass, his face open in a smile she had never once seen directed at her, his eyes warm in a way she didn’t recognize.
Eliana’s thumb hovered, then scrolled up.
He told me he has feelings for me.
Further up: Is it cold out tonight?
I’m not cold.
He’s right here with me.
Further still: The unloved one is always the mistress, Eliana.
You were only ever his insurance policy, someone to marry to change his luck.
He likes my taste.
My eye for beauty.
The one he actually loves is me.
…on and on it went.
Message after message, each one another small brick in the wall of his betrayal.
She’d never known this version of him existed, the warm one, the vivid one not in seven years of marriage, not once turned toward her.
She scrolled to the very bottom without reading the newest post, then worked her way back up through the entire thread until she reached the first message ever sent:
You already know who I am.
Aren’t the flowers in the living room lovely today?
I picked them for him myself.
He said they were beautiful.
Of course she knew who it was.
Vivian Blake a florist with a modest following online, known for staging elaborate arrangements inside penthouses and private villas for the city’s wealthier residents.
Eliana had shown Nathaniel these messages before.
He’d told her there was no proof any of it came from Vivian at all.
Some in his family had even suggested Eliana wrote the messages to herself, to frame an innocent woman.
Because most of the posts had no real evidence attached, no faces, nothing that couldn’t have been staged by a stranger.
Except tonight’s.
Should she show him this one?
She set the phone down and reached beneath her nightstand, pulling out a folded document she’d hidden there.
Her pregnancy test results.
Picked up earlier that same afternoon.
She was carrying Nathaniel’s child.
At the worst possible moment imaginable.
A tear landed on the page and bled the ink outward.
His heart wasn’t hers anymore.
What would proof even change?
She wiped her face dry.
Eliana picked up the lighter he’d left behind on the nightstand, the one he’d used to light his cigarette and set the document on fire.
He didn’t know it yet, but this divorce would be the very last request of his she ever agreed to.
Seven years of her youth, seven years of her life, given freely.
She’d paid back every debt she thought she owed him.
And now, she decided, she was done loving him.